Matt Dionne | Editor-in-Chief
Featured Image: The new changes to ancillary fees could spell the end for student journalism in Ontario. | Mahdis Habibinia
With the news of the revisions to OSAP, including the changes in grants being offered, the 10 per cent decrease in tuition, and the removal of the six-month interest-free grace period, the changes to ancillary fees seem to have been swept under the rug.
According to Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, Merrilee Fullerton, universities will be required to give students the option to opt-out of ancillary fees starting next year. Students will not be allowed to opt-out of fees related to health and well-being. However, nearly everything else could become optional—including student journalism.
Several editors from university publications have spoken out about how these changes could completely wipe them out, and Excalibur is no different. While we do receive funding from advertising, the majority of our annual budget comes from our student levy (the percentage of students’ tuition we receive). If this funding becomes optional, we would have very little idea of how much funding we could expect on an annual basis, and it could even mean we would receive no funding at all.
“With the decline in print advertising revenue in recent years, the student levy has represented an increasingly large percentage of Excalibur’s budget, to the point where it is now the main reason we can still operate. Most student clubs at York are in the same boat as well; in the vast majority of cases, the student levy is their only source of income,” Eric Rail, Excalibur’s business manager, says.
“If 50 per cent of students decide to opt-out of paying into our levy, Excalibur would be able to operate with a severely reduced budget and, therefore, a skeleton staff. If 90 per cent opt-out, what little funding Excalibur would receive would not be enough to cover even the most basic operating expenses,” Rail says.
“It would also impact our editorial team for next year. Without having even a ballpark figure of what our budget is going to be, we won’t know how many editors we can afford to hire, if any at all. We can’t tell them: ‘You might get paid, but you might also have to work here on a volunteer basis.’ All of our editors are students who may have to renounce other part-time jobs elsewhere. Another thing that would be impacted is our publication schedule. How many issues can we afford to publish? Those are things we normally plan several months before the school year starts,” he adds.
While it’s still unclear how the university will implement these changes, considering student journalism isn’t protected as an essential service, it will very likely become optional for students to opt-out of paying for it.
“We intend to ensure students have access to health and safety initiatives, and that is non-negotiable. As far as how the guidelines will be rolled out, we’re still communicating with student groups to try and decide which initiatives and organizations students will be able to opt-out of. At this point, the only thing we’re sure of is health and safety initiatives will remain mandatory,” David Piccini, parliamentary assistant to the Minister of Training, Colleges and Universities, and MPP of Northumberland-Peterborough South, says.
“The core services that are important vary from university to university. Services that are essential in the north are very different than services that are essential for a school in Toronto, so I don’t want to start prescribing what is and isn’t essential,” Piccini says. “The intention here is to provide students with choices so they can opt-out and choose how their dollars are spent. The idea that niche interests should be subsidized by thousands of students is fundamentally immoral,” he adds.
“At this time, we still expect to receive more details about how the changes will impact York’s current ancillary fee structure and can’t speculate on any specific process or changes. The Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities has indicated they will be providing guidelines to determine which ancillary fees will be mandatory going forward, and which must have a provision for students to opt-out,” Barbara Joy, chief spokesperson and director for York Media Relations, says.
“York values Excalibur as an important vehicle for informing our students and community about news, opportunities, issues, and events. Student journalism provides an excellent learning experience for future journalists and engaged citizens about the critical role journalism plays in a democracy,” Joy adds.
While it is still too early for anyone to definitively say what will happen next year, Piccini believes students will determine which services are necessary, and groups on campus who positively impact the community don’t need to worry about losing funding. While this is certainly an idealistic perspective, it’s not accurate.
York is a commuter school; many students spend very little time on campus—they go to class and go home. Because of York’s commuter-school status, groups and services that are dedicated to providing for students on campus could lose funding because students who believe they aren’t benefiting from said services may choose to opt-out of paying for them.
This isn’t how our society operates; the student levy is essentially a tax that goes towards services that impact the York community. We pay taxes that fund services that affect all aspects of our city, province, and country. We don’t have the option to opt-out of taxes that don’t affect us. We can’t, for example, opt-out of paying taxes that fund our education system, even if we don’t have children who benefit from it, neither do we have the option to opt-out of paying for healthcare services, even if we rarely use them.
If Excalibur were to shut down, it would negatively impact the York community in two significant ways. First and foremost, student newspapers are the only media outlets dedicated to campus news. Losing them would mean losing information about important campus events and occurrences.
“The work student journalists do is of critical importance. York, for example, has approximately 65,000 students, faculty, and staff. That’s larger than many towns in Canada. The issues on campus are important and need to be covered, otherwise how will students have any independent assessment of what the administration and the governing bodies are doing with their money and their future?” Paul McLaughlin, a professor in the professional writing program says.
“News from city media is, for the most part, interchangeable as city media outlets, for the most part, share the same audience. York students, however, can only voice opinions about how their immediate community is being run in one place—the same place they can read about the aforementioned issues directly impacting their lives as students. Were Excalibur to close, an alternative student-interested report on the communications, open letters, public relations releases, and newsletters employed by the York administration, its labour unions, faculty associations, and the YFS would be lost,” Dennis Bayazitov, a recent professional writing graduate from York, and former Excalibur news editor, says.
“Human-interest stories devoted to York’s aspiring artists and athletes would be lost. Timely conversations about mental health—specifically related to the York community would be lost. Thoughtful supplements highlighting the social justice work of York’s LGBTQ+, black, Asian and Indigenous communities, notably, too, would be lost. To consume news from a student like yourself is to add a unique perspective to your student experience. To close Excalibur would be to deprive York students from such perspectives,” Bayazitov adds.
“I think the loss of Excalibur would be a tragedy for York. It is a voice for the students at a time when the Ontario government, as one example, seems to be waging war with the student body. I have great respect for my students and I am convinced they would suddenly realize, if Excalibur has to close, what a gaping hole has been left in their understanding of what’s happening on campus, how their teams and student/academic leaders are doing, and, more importantly, what decisions are being made by those in power,” McLaughlin says.
Secondly, student newspapers provide opportunities for aspiring writers and journalists to learn about how the industry works, develop a portfolio, and develop invaluable experience that translates directly to their careers post-graduation.
“Many of Canada’s top journalists got their start writing for their university paper. It is a wonderful place to learn a wide array of skills essential to their future career,” McLaughlin says. “When I wrote for the Carleton newspaper, The Charlatan, it changed my life. Until then, I had no idea if I could be a writer. That experience taught me that I could become a member of this wonderful craft. Without that opportunity, my life could have been much different and not, I believe, as fulfilling as it has turned out to be,” he adds.
“This news is devastating. Student journalism is an essential component to campus life. It provides opportunities for debate, and discussion, as well as critical updates for students. For the university experience to be complete, students require leadership opportunities and work opportunities. That is how many of us go into the job world prepared,” Basma Elbahnasawy, a recent digital media graduate and former multimedia editor for Excalibur, says.
Not only will students be deprived of a publication dedicated to issues that directly relate to them, but marginalized groups will also lose a platform to have their voices heard. Every year, Excalibur includes three supplements: our LGBTQ+ issue, which comes out in November; our Black History Month issue, which comes out the first Friday in February; and our women’s day issue, which comes out the Wednesday closest to International Women’s Day. These three supplements are intended to provide these groups with a platform to raise awareness of issues that affect them.
“Excalibur offers a platform for marginalized groups to have their voices heard, and for journalists to learn how to make sure these stories are heard. When working on the LGBTQ+ supplement, I had the opportunity to reach out to members of the community to give them a chance to share their art, and stories with the kind of coverage mainstream media can’t often provide.
“I think that without Excalibur we would lose a lot of voices within the York community. York is a very diverse school, and it makes Excalibur’s news coverage diverse, relevant, and informative,” Jesse Nowlan, a fourth-year communications student and this year’s LGBTQ+ supplement coordinator for Excalibur, says.
These new changes will only further divide the campus, in a time when it’s already severely divided. Students could have the opportunity to defund groups out of spite, or hatred—students could choose to opt-out of groups that are dedicated to focusing on issues that affect minority communities simply because they disagree with said communities’ values (think, for example, of people who may choose to opt-out of funding TBLGAY for homophobic reasons).
With the current political climate, the era of ‘fake news’ and the amount of inaccurate information available, it’s imperative a campus as big and diverse as York has an unbiased news outlet available to keep students informed, and hold members of the community accountable.
When it comes to the importance of ensuring Excalibur continues to serve the York community, McLaughlin says it best: “When students are being threatened with unfair changes to their financial and academic circumstances, who better to stand up for them than their campus paper?”
